Debian 7.3, Dart at ECMA, Cloud-stealing – Snippets

Debian 7.3: The latest patch rollup update for Debian 7, Wheezy, has arrived. As usual, don’t throw away your media as all the changes are available as existing updates. This is just rolling up all the updates to date to make new installation media for newcomers. The announcement lists all the changes, security fixes and two packages that were removed. Further info at the release information page for Debian 7. Valve’s SteamOS beta, the operating system for its PC/Console SteamBox, is based on Debian.

Dart goes to ECMA: Google has made its move to make Dart, its JavaScript replacement language, a standard with the creation of TC52 (Technical Committee) at ECMA. Google says that since Dart 1.0’s release the language is production ready and ready for standardisation. Ready, yes, but it ain’t a standard yet… but people are picking up on it – For example, Notch, creator of Minecraft, used Dart in his Ludum Dare (48 hours to write a game) competition entry – and you could even watch him work in the Dart Editor live.

Securing clouds: Luke Chadwick had a nasty surprise when his Amazon Web Services bill leapt from $69 to $3000. He’d accidentally pushed his AWS credentials into GitHub and someone had decided to use them to load up 20 large AWS compute engines to do Litecoin mining. As the Hacker News commenters note, that’s $3000 burnt to make a whole $40 of Litecoin; the comments also include suggestions on securing code when checking in by auditing and scanning and how to make the AWS dashboard alert you when something out of the ordinary is happening.